It is later, after she returns from the convenience store and calls Watanabe to inform him of her arrival, that Luna sees the boxes.
* * *
—
THIS IS what she knows about her father: Born sometime in the spring of 1945, he, like many of his generation, spent his life captive to the Second World War, his research, the initial reason he crossed the Pacific to the United States, taking an unexpected turn when his parents confessed that he was an orphan—a Korean war orphan—they’d adopted during the American Occupation. Her father, an exacting academic, would’ve objected to the term “war orphan,” arguing that he’d been orphaned not by the war but by Japanese colonialism, which had forced his biological parents across the Korea Strait. Either way, what gripped him was the document his parents had shown him: a registration card bearing the name of his birthplace, Matsushiro, a small castle town in central Japan where, during the war, a labyrinthine underground bunker complex was built. Comprising miles of interlocking tunnels and designed to include a subterranean palace, the complex was never finished, but months before the war’s end, certain of Japan’s defeat, this was where the emperor expected to hide, negotiating the terms of surrender regardless of the human cost. Most records were destroyed, but historians estimate that five to ten thousand Koreans had toiled there, digging into the mountains with picks and axes, hundreds killed by dynamite blasts and cave-ins as well as malnutrition and other diseases Japan knew it had no resources to treat. Many who survived were abandoned, some executed for schematic secrecy, and among the incriminating sites excavated, several showed proof that military sex slaves had been housed there. Does this mean her father was a child of a forced Korean laborer, perhaps of a sex slave? All Luna knows is that his discovery of Matsushiro and his adoption spiraled him into a maze that catalyzed his return to Japan. The question is what he found at the center, the end of his trail.
* * *
—
WATANABE ARRIVES the next morning with containers of homecooked food. An unfussy, earthy man, he fills her father’s fridge and assesses her warmly, pointing out her family resemblance: same chin and mouth; same thick hair black enough to shine blue. Which is fair: Luna has taken after her father almost entirely, a fact that has already caused confusion here, her American accent hiccupping her interactions because, visually, she passes.
“Ready?” He hands her the urn and carries the portrait to the backseat. A social advocate with a legal background, he met her father four years ago while poking around an old Imperial naval base for demographic information about the suicide pilots stationed there during the war. By the time they left the crumbling base, they were strategizing ways to protect and preserve neglected war sites and their stories. Luna could picture their partnership right away, their skills complementary rather than overlapping, both men interested in grounded activism. It corroborates the image she has carried of her father.
The drive is pleasant but disquieting. Luna has anticipated changes, but this is a different town, with cookie-cutter houses sprouting in the backwoods, the bamboo and Zelkova groves corralled to a patch of community park. So different from what she remembers from her childhood visits, the winding footpaths and weedy shrines passed out of local memory, “local” now being a collection of outsiders, mostly suburbanites and retirees deposited by the economy’s ever receding tide. Gone too are the neighborhood pharmacy, the shadowy stationery store, the bank of rice vending machines she once begged to operate. There was also a dank tunnel used, if she remembers correctly, as an air raid shelter during the Second World War, but she finds she can’t ask. It’s ridiculous, this place that figured so little in her life, but it prickles her throat, the erasure of her past made concrete by this evidence of change and the foolishness of memory that has clung to what was always a chimera, a tantalizing echo of the mind’s desire to preserve an ephemeral moment.
“Everything’s different. I feel like Urashima TarÅ,” she says, taking in the new hair salon, the chain convenience store, the renovated produce mart with stacks of instant food boxes out front. She is reminded of the boxes she found at the house. “Was my father thinking of moving?” she asks, watching the road curve into a pretty mountain forest. Her father’s death, she knows, was unexpected: a heart attack.
“Not that I know of. Why?” He squints at the tip of the temple roof emerging above the trees in the distance.
She tells him about the boxes, seven in all, shoved into inconspicuous corners—under the coffee table, behind half-open doors—as if left there by a forgetful child. “They’re full of paper—research, I think, but they’re random.” Since graduate school, Luna has followed her father’s career, periodically running his name through academic search engines, thrilling at the discovery of a new article, the proximity of his views to hers a secret pleasure she wants to resent. But last year, three changes hijacked her attention: she finished her dissertation, got a job at Berkeley, and got married. The next time she searched her father’s name was after Watanabe’s phone call; heart stuttering, she combed through the results, but there was nothing new. Last night, seeing the boxes, she felt the same apprehensive excitement, but when she slit the tape, all she found were typed pages, the topics ranging and unrelated to any of his previous output, many of them fragments with no beginning or end, the dropped punctuation and missing citations eerie, like looking at a featureless body. She turned on all the lights in the house. “It’s odd—I remember him being meticulous.”
“Maybe they were meant to be recycled?”
“They were sealed, as if for a move—or maybe storage.”
Watanabe has no reply. Following the signs to the temple lot, he parks, and they sit for a moment. Then, gathering the urn and portrait, they climb the shady steps to the main hall.
* * *
—
THE SERVICE is simple, with the elderly priest and his son taking turns to recite the sutras, the rhythmic beat of the mokugyo fish drum overriding the regiments of progressive time, transporting her to an adjacent sphere that seems harmonized with her jet lag. Rocked in the hammock of sound, hypnotized by her father’s monochrome gaze observing her from the altar, she almost misses her cue to offer incense, and the hour vanishes, the final silence releasing her to earth, but barely. She carries the feeling with her to her grandparents’ grave, a square plot with a stone pillar. She never thought this would be how she’d see them again, their names carved into granite, their two urns stowed side by side in the shallow chamber beneath. She feels curiously uplifted to see her father’s urn join theirs, his a lighter gray but with the same domed lid. It is a pleasant day, the sun burning the morning chill, and it is only when Watanabe hands her the portrait retrieved from the priests that the finality hits her. And maybe this is true for Watanabe too, his face bereft beyond sympathy. She is glad the proceeds from her father’s house will fund the initiative he started with Watanabe.